Posts [ 17 ]

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

I'm having a weird problem that maybe someone out there knows how to work around. I have two PCs on my desk, one running 32 bit XP and one running 64 bit Vista. Both machines have the latest versions of Visual Assist, ViEmu and VS2005 installed.

On the XP machine, hitting ESC with an intellisense tooltip up closes the tooltip and also takes me out of insert mode. On the Vista machine, if there is a tooltip open, ESC only closes the tooltip and I remain in insert mode. Obviously I much prefer the behavior on XP

I've gone through the configurations of everything involved line by line on the two machines and verified that they're identical, so I am pretty sure it's not a config option somewhere I forgot to set.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

I managed to make this behavior go away by uninstalling and reinstalling ViEmu. Now on both machines ESC also exits insert. I forgot to mention in my previous post, but both machines had the vaxesc option set, so it should have been the same.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

It seems like I spoke too soon - my ESC issue is back and no amount of uninstall/reinstall seems to fix me anymore. I'm not sure exactly what I did to make it come back - I ran another copy of VS2005, and that one had the issue. At some point I must have shut down the one that didn't have the problem and now I can't make it go away anywhere.

I'm going to try reinstalling VA and ViEmu from scratch one more time.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

Jon, I'm not really sure it's related to installation order. For some reason, Visual Assist sometimes gobbles up keystrokes, and they never get to ViEmu. There is no reason I can understand for the difference in behavior, but there seems to be some race condition or some order dependency. One additional problem is that I haven't been able to reproduce it myself. I hope to be able to address this within the next few days.

I'll get back to you here or by email about it to try to run some instrumented tests.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

The many hours of investigation have finally rendered some results. Awkward results, but some results in any case.

I was able to reproduce the problem in a fresh Vista x86 VM, with VS2005, the latest ViEmu (2.2.6) and the latest Visual Assist (1647). After reproducing the problem, I tried setting up a full ViEmu dev environment, which involves installing VS.NET 2003 and a few additional tools, and the problem went away!

I did this again, and found that, indeed, installing VS.NET 2003 on the same machine seems to fix the issue. It makes it impossible for me to debug the issue, which would be a hard task in any case, but at least it solves it.

So I suggest that you install VS.NET 2003 on the same machine (I only installed Visual C++ support, not any of the other languages), and see whether that fixes the problem. Please let me know whether that works.

This is a tough issue. Event notification seems to work differently sometimes for no good reason, there is no documented dependency that would cause this. And the cause seems to be somewhere deepn in the bowels of Visual Studio, .NET or Windows itself. The fact that installing VS.NET 2003 fixes it leads me to believe there is some kind of dependency on system DLLs or .NET assemblies -- given Windows' fragile design, something in the VS.NET 2003 installation makes VS2005 behave differently, maybe loading another version of some DLL or .NET assembly. You can guess that trying to track the issue with such a subtle dependency is all but impossible. Hopefully the VS.NET 2003 is a viable solution to have it quickly corrected.

By the way, I also tested whether only installing VS.NET 2003's "prerequisites" fixes it, and it turns out it doesn't. You need to actually install VS.NET to fix it (and it's not necessary to even run it once for the magical effect to happen).

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

Ah, the dreaded Heisenbug...

I think I can test this at home, given that a) I just reproduced the issue by installing Visual Assist in my home dev environment (Vista Ultimate 32 bit, VS2008; ViEmu by itself was working perfectly fine,) and b) I should have a VS2003 install set lying around somewhere. One difference is that at home I am using VS2008, not VS2005, and the same issue shows up.

However, I don't think it's possible for me to test this at work given that installing VS2003 breaks the latest "approved" versions of a certain hardware SDK that I need. Maybe if I get some downtime after our next deadline to rebuild everything, but that's a few weeks away.

I did verify that the issue goes away when I uninstall Visual Assist. I don't think that adds any new information to the pile, though, apart from verifying that the issue is for certain related to VA + Vista + VS200[5, 8].

I'll try to find my 2003 install at home at least and verify that that fixes me there.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

Jon, please let me know how it works for you. I know that the problem depends on Visual Assist, interacting with all other issues. This bug is "Heisen" even before you run the debugger: just installing it fixes the behavior!

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

Hello Pkyoung,

I have tried it and found that if you uninstall VS.NET 2003, unfortunately, the buggy behavior comes back. I will keep experimenting to see whether I can find exactly *what* fixes the behavior (although it's a daunting task). I hope that I can find the exact file or registry entry that fixes the problem.

Meanwhile, the only known solution is to have VS.NET 2003 properly installed.

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

I found a different partial fix. Maybe this will help figure out the root cause?

If I remove the default Visual Studio mapping for Esc in the text editor, normally Edit.SelectionCancel (Esc (Text Editor)) according to the options dialog, then everything seems to work great. The one exception is that "Esc" now always takes me completely out of insert mode, even if novaxesc is set and there is a Visual Assist listbox up. Since that's my preferred behavior as far as I'm concerned this is perfect

Given that I am using ViEmu's visual selections instead of Visual Studio's, I don't even notice that this mapping is missing. On a side note, the joy I feel at discovering this workaround is pretty good evidence of how dependent I've become on ViEmu

Re: Intellisense tooltips sucking up ESC

Thanks so much for sharing this! I think it could be very helpful in other cases where this degenerate behavior happens. Indeed this is a "dark area" of ViEmu <-> VAX interaction, only padded by the fact that it happens in so few installations. It's good to know of at least two work-arounds, given that debugging it seems impossible.

Indeed, ViEmu/VS slowly blends into Visual Studio, and one day it seems like vi/vim editing in VS was there from the beginning. I'm really happy, as that means the tool is doing its job sweetly: the more it disappears in the background, the better it means it is.